Greek Chorus in 09

Abstract

The question of the chorus has been of special importance to twentiethcentury theater. Plays like Toller’s Mass and Man, O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, Kazantzakis’ Capodistria, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, and Heiner Muller’s Mauser attempt to assemble people in a public setting of common interests and concerns. The quest for a viable chorus explores the possibility of a modern socio-political community. How can such a community be constituted and governed? How can it claim legitimacy? How can it define its space and its membership? If we assume that the ancient chorus represented the citizens of the polis, whom might a modern chorus represent? Recently Greek theater has offered some interesting experiments. Among the several offerings of the Athens Festival in the Summer of 2008, two stood out in terms of both media coverage and audience response, the opening and the closing one. The opening show, X skinis: Afta pou kapsan to sanidi (On Stage: Burning Down the House), produced by composer Stamatis Kraounakis, was a review of twentieth-century Greek music for the stage. Its program moved mostly chronologically through famous songs from epitheorisi/variety show, operetta, ancient comedy and modern Greek and non-Greek plays. People of all generations packed the Odeon of Herodes Atticus to hear and sing along all-time favorites. The show that closed the Festival was a stage adaptation of Dimitris Dimitriadis’s novella Pethaino san chora (I am Dying as a Country) (1978), produced by director Michael Marmarinos. In it, a foreign occupation has crushed a country’s culture and thrown it into a state of advancing anarchy, sterility, and self-destruction. People packed “Peiraios 260,” a furniture factory turned theater in an industrial part of Athens, to see a devastating commentary on twentieth-century Greek history. The contrast between the celebration of the first show and the lament of the second could not be starker, in terms not only of content but also of dramatic style. For example, Kraounakis brought out the legendary 1960s singer Zozo Sapountzaki to recreate her old hit “Panayia mou, ena paidi” (“My God, what a guy”), 1 while Marmarinos brought out the legendary 1960s singer Beba Blanche to declare “I despise this country”